Israel Determined to Get More Than Scrap of Paper out of Negotiations

Yaakov Morris, Minister of the Permanent Mission of Israel to the United Nations, told a Labor Zionist Alliance leadership seminar here this weekend that “Israel is determined that this time it will not emerge from negotiations with worthless scraps of paper or guarantees so vague that they represent nothing more than a propaganda shield instead of security.”

Addressing several hundred Labor Zionist Alliance leaders’ from the Eastern Seaboard at Grossinger’s Hotel, Morris said that “Israel’s approach to territorial settlement is exclusively determined by defensibility, not expansion. Withdrawal is conditional on political concessions, which are after all concessions to peace by the Arabs. If the Arabe demonstrate palpable evidence of peaceful intent, Israel will be flexible on the territorial question. It is not territory which is central to the conflict, but peace and security.”

Irving Kessler, executive director of the United Israel Appeal, said that his office was “startled by a cash flow in December” which “still shows that the American Jew cares and is responding in a way that counts — with his sustenance.”

Jacob Katzman, executive vice president of the LZA, discussing the 70th anniversary of Labor Zionism in America, declared that “concerned young American Jews are seeking an ideological compass by which to steer their lives amidst the complex problems they face both as Jews and as part of the whole American society.”

Continuing, Katzman said: “They want to understand themselves as Jews, as part of the Jewish community here, the Jewish people in the world, and their relationship to, as well as their responsibility for, Israel.” He added that “they want a social effort by which to live in their families, neighborhoods, businesses, the American body politic, and in relation to other groups seeking their own ethnic identities.” The theme of the LZA gathering was “Am Echad: One People. One Nation.”